The main reason being: materials are cheap - plant time is what's expensive.

First, raw materials are such a small fraction of chip costs that even if the market price of a given material spikes up two orders of magnitude briefly, the market can eat the spike. For many broadly used materials, this alone is "end of story" - the majority of consumers will balk at the price and exit the market long before semiconductors supply chains will. And second, between the costs of halting production and the low volumes of actual materials involved, supply buffers exist on sites. That plays against supply chain fragility.

It's one thing to have everything JITted within an inch of its life on a razor thin margins car plant. It's another matter entirely to have a "potential supply disruption" in semiconductor manufacturing that will, if all supply truly and fully stopped tomorrow, convert to actual stopped plants in 4 months unless something is done about it in the meanwhile. And that "unless something is done" bites hard when you have a lot of engineering capability underlined by general price insensitivity. As semiconductor industry does.

This is literally the thesis of each and every one of these articles. Only one mine in the world can produce sand for semiconductors, etc. It makes the arguments incredibly persuasive and the predictions almost always wrong.

And in reality... I'd wager that the semiconductor industry uses relatively little bromine, that it can be recycled or sourced from other places with minimal technological investment (e.g., as a simple byproduct of salt production), and so on.

The real head-scratcher is why the US refused to extradite the Shah back to Iran for trial. What a different world we'd be in right now: the hostage crisis never would've happened. Moderates would've been empowered. Iran's completely valid historical grievances would've been addressed. Who knows, maybe the Iran-Iraq war never would've happened. The US wouldn't have provided WMDs to Saddam Hussein. No Gulf War I and II.